In her red YSL shoes, architect Amanda Levete sprints across the courtyard she designed at the Victoria & Albert Museum to take cover in the gallery extension beneath it. Beyond perforated metal gates that create a new entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) on Exhibition Road, the courtyard laid with white porcelain tiles doubles as the roof of the 1,100-square-metre gallery meant for temporary exhibitions. Here’s where the V&A’s blockbuster shows—such as the Pink Floyd and Alexander McQueen exhibitions—will be staged.

September 30 will see ‘Opera: Passion, Power and Politics’ opening here. These ticketed exhibitions are the real money-spinners for the museum, which has free entry to its permanent collection, so the V&A invested GBP48 million in the project.

The stairs, leading to the gallery below ground, pass under the V&A’s Western Range Building, which is held up by steel beams. Photo Courtesy: Hufton-Crow

Known to ask visitors to her London-based architectural practice, AL_A, to take off their shoes at the door, Amanda Levete proves that running in heels across a porcelain courtyard with more curves than a skateboarder’s paradise, is perfectly safe. Handmade by the centuries-old Dutch company Tichelaar Makkum, the decoratively grooved tiles let the rainwater run off. It was a bold move to commission this surface for what is both floor and roof, but, as Amanda says, “This is in the spirit of the V&A with its mosaic and tiled floors, and shows the same spirit of technological design meeting arts and crafts as Aston Webb’s original building.”

When she was denied permission to open up the closed face of Webb’s wall onto Exhibition Road and replace it with a columned screen, she challenged English Heritage—the charity that looks after heritage sites in the UK—with his early drawings to prove that it was his (Webb’s) intention all along, and won.

Now, behind those gates, the cafe in the courtyard has AL_A-designed aluminium ‘6mm’ tables and ‘8mm’ chairs, which have been laser-cut by Moroso to follow the tiled floor’s diagonal pattern. Facing it, an oculus beams daylight into the column-free gallery below. Hollowed out of the ground to a height of 10.5 metres, the gallery has a pleated steel-plate roof to support the weight of the tiled courtyard laid over it.

Free-spirited Amanda left her academic all-girls’ school, aged 16, after being caught sunbathing naked on the roof. One time, she went to school barefoot and was sent home; another time she wore a sheet as a dress. But she has no regrets. “Teachers gave up on me and I decided to leave after O levels. No way would I try for Oxford or Cambridge.” Instead, she got into the Architectural Association without the required maths and drawings.

In 1985, after meeting Czech architect Jan Kaplický, she left Richard Rogers’ firm, where she’d worked after her training at the Architectural Association. In 1989 Amanda set up Future Systems with Kaplický, taking with her the love for fluid indoor-outdoor spaces.

In 1995, they were asked to submit drawings for a new media centre at Lord’s, the cricket ground, where she was left waiting outside holding their plans, because tradition did not allow women to enter men’s enclosures. She laughs. “Men were not admitted without wearing a necktie, which Jan never did, so he was left outside too.” But they won it. By the time they finished their aluminium pod on a pedestal, Future Systems almost went bankrupt. Winning the Stirling Prize for it brought them GBP20,000 in prize money, and the commission to design the new Selfridges in Birmingham.

The ‘8mm’ chair designed by AL_A and produced by Moroso, references the pattern and colour of the courtyard tiles. Photo Courtesy: Victoria and Albert Museum

The couple divorced in 2003 but worked together till 2009, when they decided to separate; Kaplický died of a heart attack just after. “It was difficult because I had not reconciled with him,” Amanda says.

Amanda set up AL_A in 2009. Before the V&A, its most celebrated project was Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT). On the drawing board is the London headquarters of broadcasting company Sky, Bangkok’s Central Embassy retail-and-hotel complex, a Maggie’s day-care centre for cancer patients in Southampton, and the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

The music she chose on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs showed this steely architect’s sentimental side. Along with the chanteurs that introduced the heady romance of France, she chose Westlife’s Uptown Girl, admitting that as a working mother she often missed being at the school gates—so after breakfast, she would dance to it with her son Josef. “It’s important to seize the time,” she says.